As most of you know, I have been using and recommending JungleDisk as my backup service of choice. So far, I’ve been very pleased with its performance, features, and support. It makes recovering from disaster very easy. I can also use it for version tracking while working on things such as proposals, letters, etc. This is due to JungleDisk’s ability to keep changed versions (and deleted files) for a specified number of days.
Carbonite is recommended by quite a few people that are sponsored by the company. True enough, most of them offer disclaimers about the sponsorship, and I’m sure that they actually use the product. However, here is the problem.
Carbonite has planted positive reviews of its service on Amazon.com and other places. That is just not cool to do.
While their service may be ok – I would not fully trust a company that crosses that line. Advertising and endorsements are acceptable, but planting reviews is not. If they cross that line – then what other line might they cross – with your data.
Oh yeah – one of the reasons that I prefer JungleDisk is that at least part of their software is open sourced. Your data is actually encrypted client-side and stored with Amazon’s S3 service. Even if JungleDisk were to go out of business, you could still access your data on Amazon’s servers.
The same can’t be said of Carbonite.
http://ftothefourth.blogspot.com/2009/01/question-of-trust.html
http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/carbonite-stacks-the-deck-on-amazon/
